Marlene Dumas’s C Love from 1999 brings together the utterly arresting style and transfixing psychological depth for which the artist is best known. Eschewing the stronghold academic training that is drawing from life, Dumas’s sources are consciously secondary, taken from ready-made and mass-produced images to interrogate issues of sexuality and gender, birth and death, the evil and the banal, often inspired by her experiences growing up in South Africa during the apartheid era.

Sensually painted with the artist’s distinctive wet-on-wet method, letting watery tones of peach, red and black bleed into the other, the present work questions the nature of desire, in relation to the unobtainable but longed for subject. A master colourist, Dumas' varied formal choices in C Love, including her heightened and tonal palette, are as crucial as her subject. Without a specific place or context, the sitter's form is distinct from her dark surroundings, which thinly veil a blushy red and pink underpainting matching the colouration of the sitter's body. Delineated with brushy vigor, Dumas' subject suggests both naturalism and caricature, communicating a visual identity that is at once biological and sexual. Evoking the placelessness of art historical antecedents within the tradition of the nude, including Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du Monde, C Love is a reclamation of the female form within a tradition of nudes, simultaneously revealing multiple facets of her body and face through perspectival foreshortening and bodily contortion.

Throughout an oeuvre defined by the transgressive possibilities of painting Dumas has used nakedness to explore love, desire, shame and vulnerability. Indeed the artist situates her art between “the pornographic tendency to reveal everything and the erotic inclination to hide what it is all about” (Marlene Dumas, ‘Pornographic Tendency’, Marlene Dumas, 1986, online). Her understanding of the erotic is intrinsic to the medium itself; while photography reveals all, painting blurs and conceals. The artist paints from photographic material, culled from magazines, newspapers, films, art history and her own polaroid photographs, preferring the anonymity, the amoral touch that accompanies this distance. With an expressive, sensual handling of paint, Dumas lifts her works beyond their source imagery, exploiting the semantic transformations between photography and painting. The present work is a testament to the significance of this practice, a photographic image transformed into washes of lucid pigment.

Prior to the completion of the present work, in 1998 Dumas was approached by the Dutch filmmaker and photographer Anton Corbijn, to collaborate on a series of portraits in Amsterdam. Together, Corbijn and Dumas visited various gentlemen's clubs in search of the gritty, the unglamorous and the unique facets of the profession. Working from her own photographs taken at this time, Dumas directly engaged with her subjects without the pretense of obscuring or concealing who the women are. Like many artists before her who looked to brothels, nightclubs and theatre to expose the underbelly of the vibrant cosmopolitan city, Dumas engages with an art historical subject matter confronted by the likes of Edgar Degas, Toulouse Lautrec and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

The close-up portrait format of C Love is grounded in an isolating focus that imbues the subject with grandeur and melancholy. Inspired by the European existential painters such as Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon, Dumas’s own visual lexicon enacts in a sustained dialogue with one of art history’s most sustained genres - portraiture - while engaging with contemporary history’s haunting and continuing nightmares. Merging past and present, and blurring the sense of time and place, Dumas forces the viewer to grapple with the full force of her subject’s humanity, which becomes a gateway “to a psychological state: of the artist, of a society, of the viewer, and only at times of the subject” (Rodney Bolt, “The Burdensome Image: Marlene Dumas”, in The Lancet Psychiatry, Vol. 1, No. 7, 2014, p. 509).

Dumas engages her capacity to shock and unsettle through painterly frankness, utilizing overt sexuality and societal conceptions of vulgarity to implicate the art viewing public in the conditions of her imagery. Describing the effect of works such as C Love, Ilaria Bonacossa writes, "these works are more than the stereotypes of pornography; they make us uncomfortable because they represent the visual compromise of how we negotiate ourselves as sexual animals and intellectual human beings" (Ilaria Bonacossa, "Further than 'I' can see," in: Marlene Dumas, London 2009, p. 169). In C Love, Dumas' subject is both objectified and a subjective force, defying conventions reinforced through centuries of art history, meeting the male gaze and gazing back, ultimately subverting it.